The 2016 edition of the annual topcites list is still very much dominated by experiment, in particular the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, with the ATLAS and CMS papers at the [1] and [2] positions as they have been since 2013 (joined by the ATLAS and CMS instrumentation papers [12,13]). Indeed, they have now cracked the top ten of the all time list, where they are the only papers from the 2010s and, together with the 2006 PYTHIA [4] and 2002 GEANT4 [6] papers, the only papers from this century. The ATLAS and CMS collaborations produced a joint paper in 2015 on the Higgs boson mass and it makes its first appearance in the Top Forty this year [32]. The papers from the 1990s on the AdS/CFT correspondence [5,14,20] continue to be strongly represented. A breakthrough paper from 2006 by Ryu and Takayanagi [39], which connects entanglement entropy and Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, has made its first appearance in the Top Forty list as interest grows in the connection between quantum information concepts and quantum gravity. Aside from these papers, all of the theoretical papers in the top twenty are resource papers centered around LHC-relevant simulations [4,6,7,8,9,16,19]. The 21st century simulation codes Sherpa and POWHEG make their first appearance on the Top Forty list this year [35,38] following a long, steady climb in their annual citation rates [2008 paper, 2004 paper]. Away from the LHC-zone, observational cosmology rules the top twenty, with familiar favorites [3,10,15,17,18] and one very important newcomer [11], to which we now turn.

The gravitational wave discovery paper [11] by the LIGO Scientific and Virgo collaborations appeared simultaneously in Physical Review Letters and on arXiv.org in February. By April it had 200 citations and by July 500 citations. In late December Science Magazine named this discovery the Breakthrough of the Year for 2016. So far this seems to have exerted little influence on the rest of the topcite list (though one can detect an uptick in citations of Einstein’s original GR paper and his 1937 paper on gravitational waves). It will be interesting to see what happens in 2017.

The other big news of 2016 was the possible di-photon (or gamma-gamma) excess reported in December of 2015 by ATLAS [24] and CMS [29] in papers that were, unprecedentedly for the Top Forty list, neither arXiv eprints nor journal articles. As a potential signal for New Physics, this precipitated an intense period of research. The observations generated more than 400 theory papers citing the ATLAS and CMS reports. This collection of theory papers acquired a Hirsh index of 92, that is 92 of these citing papers themselves garnered at least 92 citations. Publishing these theory papers was a matter of controversy. JHEP declined for some time to publish any theory paper explaining the resonance; Physical Review Letters chose four to illustrate the ferment in the particle theory community. Finally at the ICHEP conference in Chicago in August it was announced that the signal disappeared when studied in the larger LHC data set accumulated in 2016. In the still-relevant words of Maurice Goldhaber, “not all candidates get elected”.

The remainder of the list includes familiar papers from previous Top Forty lists. On the theory side are more LHC-relevant simulation papers [22,23,25,28,30,31], Hawking radiation [21], inflation [26,34], large extra dimensions [33] and neutrino mixing [37]. The list is rounded out by the first resullts from LUX on dark matter [27] (the final results from LUX appeared in August, too late for this edition) and the update of cosmological parameters from the full WMAP data set [36].

Traditionally DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) have been associated with published papers in the digital era, but papers are not the only research objects that physicists may want to search, use, and cite. We talked with Jim Simone of Fermilab about his efforts to get DOIs assigned to MILC collaboration datasets and to get records of them uploaded to INSPIRE.

How is Jim involved with the MILC collaboration?

Jim is a member of FERMILAB-LATTICE collaboration, which works closely with MILC on scientific projects involving matrix elements and flavor physics. MILC generates data sets consisting of lattice gauge configuration files, which the collaboration has made openly available for others to use, as is increasingly becoming required for federally funded research in the U.S.

What is the MILC collaboration’s connection to the International Lattice Data Grid (ILDG)?

Jim was an early organizer of the ILDG, which is intended as a data grid to enable collaborations to share gauge configurations. The ILDG metadata catalog had its limitations; it only held limited kinds of metadata, sometimes making it difficult for people to find what they were looking for. People involved with the project have been trying to fill in the gaps, including the biggest problem: connecting scientific papers produced by the data to the datasets.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, ILDG is considering to use INSPIRE as a catalog to connect papers with datasets, making the data usable and findable by all physicists, including HEP and nuclear phenomenologists, as ILDG is currently only used by lattice scientists. In INSPIRE the datasets and associated papers can be searched starting with the papers in order to see what configurations were used to get the results, though in the upcoming version of INSPIRE, the Data collection will be made public and searching will also be possible starting with the individual datasets and from there finding what papers were produced from these configurations.

Why and how did Jim go about getting DOIs assigned to the datasets? What challenges did he face?

Jim believes DOIs, as public, persistent identifiers, are a natural mechanism to identify the datasets, which are public, first class data objects, and permanent. With DOIs, the configurations will be better integrated into the ILDG and INSPIRE.

In the case of published papers, DOIs are assigned by publishers, but this route would not work for datasets. While INSPIRE is equipped to directly issue DOIs, MILC’s direct connection to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) made it practical for DOIs to be issued by DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). In either case, DOIs are registered with the central agency DataCite.

ILDG has started a discussion on how other groups can get DOIs for their datasets. Outside the DOE, CERN also issues DOIs, and regional ILDG groups can help members get DOIs and serve as gatekeepers to keep the metadata clean and clear. DataCite can also help researchers find registration organizations.

For Jim it was a learning experience working with OSTI and interacting with their web services. As one of his main focuses was findability, Jim wanted to include lots of searchable metadata in the dataset records so to help physicists find the particular configurations they wanted. This amount of metadata was more than OSTI was used to receiving when minting DOIs, but they were able to work with Jim’s requests and he considered them a great help through the entire process

Beyond getting the DOIs assigned, another challenge was figuring out how citations should be marked up in papers, both written and digitally. With the goals of making the datasets findable and identifiable, Jim and the ILDG wanted people to be able to see the DOI in a print version of a reference list as well as click it in a digital version. In order to make the process as transparent as possible for people citing the datasets, Jim worked with us to include instructions in the metadata of the INSPIRE records and OSTI records.

For researchers unsure of how to cite datasets that do not include specific citation guidelines in their metadata, DataCite and CrossRef have developed a DOI citation formatter that can take a DOI registered by either of these services and format its citation in a variety of styles.

When going through the publication process with a paper that used MILC configurations, Jim found the referees and copy editors weren’t familiar with how the citations should appear. Most objects with a DOI are published papers that can be cited in written format using a journal reference, volume, page range, etc., so the DOI is often left out of the text of a reference list. However, following this standard would not make the datasets adequately identifiable to the human eye.

The community known as FORCE 11 (Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) has developed eight principles of data citation practices with equal emphasis on human readability and machine-actionability. As these recommendations become more widely endorsed in research communities and researchers become accustomed to citing datasets in their papers, the issue of human identifiable data citations will most likely be resolved.

What advice does Jim have for others looking to make their datasets more findable and citable?

Jim has two pieces of advice: get DOIs and mark up the metadata in a way that’s sensible for the community who will use the datasets. DataCite makes this simple by being explicit about its mandatory metadata requirements, while also allowing for additional recommended and optional metadata.

At INSPIRE we look forward to integrating more dataset DOIs into our records. Send your questions and comments about dataset DOIs in INSPIRE to feedback@inspirehep.net.

The annual INSPIRE Topcites list provides a snapshot of the topics that were of greatest interest in a given calendar year. To maintain the focus on HEP, we construct the list by considering only citations from core papers. To be complete, we also provide individual Topcite lists for each arXiv category we cover.

Continuing a recent trend, the 2015 Top 40 list is virtually unchanged from the previous year, save for a little re-shuffling in the middle order and the quantum fluctuations of classic papers near the bottom. The leading five papers from 2014 securely held their positions, with almost 150 citations separating Maldacena’s 1997 AdS/CFT paper at number [5] from this year’s number [6] paper, the 2002 GEANT4 description paper (which itself was seventh last year).

The first new paper on the list appears at number [7], a Planck paper on cosmological parameters that updates the results of a 2013 Planck paper [3]. Since its posting in February 2015 this paper has collected over 700 citations and brings to four the total number of Planck papers on the list, including another February 2015 paper on inflation [27] which, again, updates a 2013 paper [30].

At number [15] we have the second paper making its debut, a 2014 descendant of the 2011 MadGraph5 paper [16], describing a software package for automatically calculating cross sections at next-to-leading order.

Of the papers on the list submitted to arXiv.org, 11 were from hep-ph, 4 from hep-th, the 2 Higgs discovery papers were, of course, from hep-ex and 10 were from astro-ph (8 from astro-ph.CO and the two 1998 supernova papers [10, 13] that would have been in astro-ph.CO if this subcategory had existed when they were written). The astro-ph papers are all observational, so we see a roughly equal number of theoretical and “experimental” papers. The classic papers from before the digital age, however, are all theoretical works on particle physics and cosmology that have been summoned to the list by recent research and discovery. Interestingly, the charts of their annual citation counts all show an impressively upward trajectory:

The INSPIRE service is operated by a global consortium, including IHEP in Beijing , We strive to connect the global High-Energy Physics (HEP) community, indexing over 1.000.000 relevant publications and offering accurate author profiles with citation statistics. . To celebrate our global reach, and serve the diversity of our community, some of our blog posts relevant to the Chinese HEP community will also appear in Chinese on our pages.

Let us know what you think about this and check out INSPIRE-HEP blog and twitter for more news. Our Chinese colleagues can also check our China Weibo micro-blog

INSPIRE is committed to keep up with all the new publications in the field of high energy physics. As part of that, over the years, INSPIRE has managed to collect more than 30.000 theses! Only last year INSPIRE added more than 2000 theses to its collection. Approximately 70% of them are Phd level.

Figure 1: Total number of theses in INSPIRE

Although theses only cover the 3% of the total HEP publications collection, they made up 40% of user submissions in 2015, so it is noticeable that there is a large demand for better coverage. Finding all the theses concerning the HEP field every year from around the world is a very difficult task. While the focused and devoted INSPIRE team constantly searches for new publications, it might not find all of them, which is why we need your help.

Figure 2: Thesis collection categorized by field

As with every other publication on INSPIRE, when submitting a thesis a person, is automatically given an author profile, which will include his first publication. In case this publication is not his first the author profile will already exist and it will get updated.

For all of these reasons we recommend that all students who want to start building their career in high energy physics should suggest their thesis to INSPIRE. . Moreover, professors and supervisors should also encourage and recommend this action to their students. Please note that for those of you a CERN, we take theses available on CDS automatically.

If you are interested in submitting your thesis to INSPIRE, check out INSPIRE labs. All the analytical steps and directions that will guide you through the thesis suggestion process can be found here.

Interested in what we have been working on? Drop us a line at feedback@inspirehep.net and stay tuned to our Twitter and blog for updates!

If you haven’t heard about the THOR project, you’re missing out on a lot of changes in the open scientific community and the forces that drive these changes forward. THOR is a 30-month project funded by the European Commission. Its purpose is to establish seamless integration between articles, data, and researchers across the research lifecycle. This will create a wealth of open resources and foster a sustainable international e-infrastructure. THOR started this June and its goal is to improve the interconnection of the existent persistent identifiers so that a researcher will not have the need for multiple persistent identifiers that provide information only for a part of his research. Moreover, it aims to form economies of scale, enrich existing research services, and create opportunities for innovative solutions throughout the lifecycle of scientific research projects.

How does THOR work?

THOR’s main goal is to create sustainable services, not just prototypes or proofs of concept. These services will be built to be accessible to all researchers, no matter which discipline, institution or country they work in. The INSPIRE team at CERN, along with DataCite and ORCID, will collaborate with the British Library, EMBL, DRYAD, ANDS, PLOS, Pangaea and ELSEVIER, organisations and publishers from a variety of scientific fields.

All of THOR’s initiatives revolve around the following set of actions and proposals:

The leverage of two community-driven global persistent identifier (PID) initiatives for contributors (ORCID profiles) and scientific data artifacts (DOIs through DataCite) to build tools to serve the evolving needs of the research community

Deliver PID-based services to submit, identify, attribute, and cite artefacts, starting with four disciplinary communities: Biological and Medical sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences and the Humanities

Create PID integration and interoperability solutions for research institutions, libraries, data centers, publishers, and research funders

Enhance the expertise of the European research community by running an intensive training program, and creating a knowledge base for practitioners integrating PIDs into research information systems.

THOR and INSPIRE

Because of the nature of the community and the existing infrastructure that INSPIRE has built over the years, it is one of the most significant THOR project partners. INSPIRE’s database and author profiles are perfect candidates for the integration of the two PID-based services mentioned, ORCID and DataCite, which present a way to create a bidirectional connection with other scientific communities and repositories. These kinds of features improve the workflow of the users of INSPIRE by building seamless connections to other services such as HepData, which connects the author’s research papers with the corresponding data, and more importantly promote a new era of “open-access”-friendly scientific information services.

If you are interested in project THOR and/or have questions about the actions it promotes, feel free to contact us at [email-address], follow project THOR on Twitter, or leave your comments below.

In 2010 we moved the Jobs Collection from SPIRES to INSPIRE; 5 years later, this collection is one of the most visited and active on INSPIRE. Here are some statistics to illustrate how important the “Jobs Collection” appears to be to you.

Figure 1: Job posts through the last years

As you can see in Figure 1, the number of jobs that were posted in INSPIRE has increased a lot during the last 3 years. This is happening thanks to our colleagues’ efforts to scan all of the HR sections of the official webpages of the world’s scientific labs and universities to include related job postings. To make it easier for you to find the best job suited for you, we offer you compact and summarized information through features such as the job matrix.

Figure 2: Clicks on the Job Collection

In Figure 2, we notice that the use of the Jobs Collection continues to increase throughout the years and follows specific patterns. We can observe a seasonal growth of the traffic every fall, along with a general yearly 13% growth in traffic from 2013 to 2015. This only means for us that the service is an essential part of the scientific community’s workflow, a page that stays bookmarked for our users and is strongly connected to your quest for new opportunities and objectives. Our goal is to to serve the scientific community, so we will continue to gather more sources and to extend the coverage of this collection.

After analyzing this data, another interesting point that comes up is the scientific fields and the position levels that are offered through INSPIRE. In Figure 3 and 4 you can see the distribution of the offered positions, based on the field of physics and position level. As you can see, while INSPIRE is mostly useful for the HEP community, you can also find postings from many other fields of physics such as astro-ph. You find such job postings in an organized fashion by browsing the Job Matrix.

Figure 3: Positions offered through INSPIRE in different fields of physics

Figure 4: Positions offered through INSPIRE in different employee levels

Finally, it is very interesting to track the breathing cycle of academia (Figure 5). Even if there were some slight changes through the years, we can notice that almost every year during September, October and November,the number of Job posts increases. Keep that in mind when you consider starting your job hunt.

Figure 5: Job posting per month through the last years

We hope that we’ve cleared up some things concerning the Jobs section. We wish the best of luck for all of you who are currently seeking a job. For further information do not hesitate to contact us at jobs@inspirehep.net.

INSPIRE cares for its community and always tries to find the best ways to address people’s academic and research needs.
“Jobs” is a very important collection because it provides a solution both for Institutions who are searching for new staff and for people who are searching for a job.

How to post Job openings on INSPIRE

If you have openings for positions in High Energy Physics and related fields, you can post your vacancies on INSPIRE. This is a quick and easy procedure. For students, postdoc, junior, senior, temporary and staff positions in the general field of physics, INSPIRE is a great place to search for candidates.

If you want to post a job, go to INSPIRE Jobs and “Add a posting” (Fig.1).

Figure 1: Add a job posting on INSPIRE

The next step is to fill out a form (Fig.2) that will provide us with all the necessary information about the job you want to post on INSPIRE. This form will help you specify your exact needs for an employee and inform people of all the required qualifications. Not all fields are mandatory; however, the more information you provide, the easier it will be for people to find the posting and for you to attract more applications.

Figure 2: Form for Job Vacancies

Finally, after submitting your job, a confirmation message will be sent for your submission. You cannot spot the job you submitted immediately, as it will be visible only after being approved by our staff. When this procedure is completed you will receive an e-mail, so make sure to provide a valid email address.

How to search for a Job in INSPIRE

If you are interested in searching for a job or studentship in physics, we have implemented a search algorithm that will help you find the right job for you. You can refine your search by level of the job, (junior, senior, phd, etc.), region (Europe, Asia, etc.) and field (astro-ph, cond-mat, physics, etc.) as you can see in Fig.3.

Figure 3: HEPJobs search

With the Job Matrix (Fig.5), you can see how many positions exist at the moment that match your specifications and start applying. You can stay updated for new vacancies by subscribing to the RSS feed or by signing up to our mailing lists, which you can find at the bottom of the result pages or at the orange box (Fig:4).

Figure 4: Subscribe to RSS feed

Figure 5: Job Matrix

If you found this blog post interesting, stay tuned with our blog and twitter to read our next blog post about the importance of the “Jobs” collection to INSPIRE!

The INSPIRE Advisory Board counts eight experimental and theoretical physicists from participating laboratories and the community at large, plus the manager of INSPIRE’s sister service NASA Astrophysics Data System. The Board meets yearly, and the 2015 meeting took place at CERN on May 7. INSPIRE’s staff reviewed the team’s work during the previous year, and discussed with the Board the present challenges and the path ahead. The meeting of the Advisory Board is always a great opportunity for the INSPIRE team to reflect on last year’s achievements. After the meeting, we interviewed the chair of the advisory board, Michael E. Peskin, to hear his opinion on INSPIRE’s recent progress and its near future.

What is your impression of INSPIRE as an academic information service?

Michael E. Peskin. I have a long history with INSPIRE, I came to SLAC in 1982 and soon after that began interacting with the staff of the service. At that time it was the SPIRES information system, which I actually had used even before that. SPIRES first went online in the 1970s as a kind of terminal/command-line based service, where you hooked up on the internet, and put in some command-line statements that began with “q”, and out came a long list of bibliographic references. And this actually saved my life. In 1981. I was asked to give a review lecture at one of the big international conferences on composite models of quarks and leptons, a subject about which I knew very little. I put some queries into SPIRES, and out came reams of paper with 800 references, and I actually looked through most of them. Since then I have found it to be a very reliable service. It provides information on four high-energy physics areas (hep-th, hep-ph, hep-ex, hep-lat). It is as complete and correct as a bibliographic service can be. It is user-based so it is constantly being checked by all the users. It is multi-faceted, so it gives you direct keyword searching but also citation search. The citations are also used by people to construct stories about their careers. So that means that there is an incentive for people to very carefully check that all the links are correct and everything is provided. And actually citation searching is the most effective way of searching for any topic that you are not familiar with. The method is simple: you find a review paper, look at the papers that cite that review paper, and work your way back up the chain that presents itself. I have found this to be the most effective way of getting familiar with a scientific topic. But it requires that you have complete and detailed coverage of the field. INSPIRE has the level of coverage that is required.

What is your opinion about INSPIRE Labs?

M.P. There are some capabilities that I felt were much needed by INSPIRE. One of the strong motivations for the new framework of INSPIRE is the ability it gives for users to communicate back to the service. I think it is still true that, if you want to correct an error or add a reference, you fill a form or write an email, and then someone at INSPIRE has to parse that email, interpret it, and then take the correct action. This just wastes effort for everybody. The correct way to do this is to have a form submission that drives the user to enter information in the way that the database would like to receive it. Then it will be possible to act on user requests in just a few minutes. In that way we can build bibliographic entries, correct citations, give new citation links, and update the author pages and HEPNames data. I believe this is really the way the user input to the service really should work. And it is not only cool to provide such a service, but it is also a method that makes it much easier to maintain the integrity of the database with limited resources.

As part of INSPIRE Labs we are trying to test new features. What do you think should come next apart from the submission form?

M.P. The other part that really matters is the back end of the new framework. This gives the curators more effective tools to examine records. Eventually INSPIRE will incorporate machine learning to suggest changes in the records and, eventually, to fix things automatically. This also deserves a high priority. Besides that, everyone wants more effective searching.

How satisfied are you with INSPIRE’s operational improvements since the last 5 years?

M.P. Before the transition from SPIRES to INSPIRE, the old search engine had difficulty with the steadily increasing size and complexity of the database. Five years ago, the system was breaking down during periods of stress. Things have come a long way since then. You can still see some glitches but it is very rare that you see a serious problem.

And what about the content?

M.P. The content has increased, and this is amazing. A recent trend, aligned with the increased interest in our community in dark matter and dark energy, has been the expansion of the coverage of astrophysics. This is still an issue energetically discussed with the Advisory Board. Another trend has been the incorporation of informal public notes from the large collaborations, such as the CMS Physics Analysis Summaries. These often contain more information than the journal papers based on them and ought to be found in general INSPIRE searches. In any case, it is amazing how deep coverage of the different subjects have grown.

Which do you believe are the weakest areas of INSPIRE that should be improved?

M.P. I’ll give you two different answers: From the point of view of someone doing casual searching and trying to find a particular article or review, the size and coverage of the collection is very important. It is important to include the informal literature, as I have already noted. But, also, I use INSPIRE when I write evaluation letters for grant proposals or for appointments. I want to look everything a certain person has done,. People applying for positions or gants would like to have their personal records clear and easy to obtain. For that you need unique author identification, which is a big project. This is especially a problem for people from Asia. Recently I wrote an evaluation letter for a friend of mine born in China who has a very common last name. You cannot expect to simply put in his name and not get reams of garbage. INSPIRE gives authors the capability to claim papers and edit their profiles on their HEPnames page. He had not done that exercise, at least not recently. This led to his publications being mixed up with the publications of many other persons with that same name. The process of cleaning one’s personal record, and of identifying authors and citations has always been somewhat tedious. I hope that, with INSPIRE Labs and its new features, this problem will be reduced.

And, last question, in which direction do you see INSPIRE’s future heading towards?

M.P. I think the big question is, “Can we make machine learning algorithms sufficiently powerful that they can take over almost all of the burden from human curators?” The thing that makes INSPIRE so powerful right now, is that we start from arXiv, where authors type in the essential bibliographic information for their papers. But, still, people are human, and sometimes this information is ambiguous or incomplete, so we need to check it against other resources. Since this input is essentially imperfect, a lot of the effort must go into improving this stream of information so it can be used reliably by the academic community. There are not so many people that are willing to work as curators, but there is a lot of data in machine memory that with correct manipulation could revolutionize the way in which information is organized and managed. We are not there yet, in INSPIRE, Google, or any other service, but the situation continually improves.

INSPIRE has already brought a new way of accessing scientific resources. Today, journals are mainly used for historical data and publications. Papers from the 1980’s are still important, and they are accessed through journals. But a paper written in the past couple of years was probably issued as an eprint on arXiv. As an author, you don’t want to wait months for a journal to publish it, in order to make it public. As a reader, you want to find this in a literature search the day after it hits the internet.

But now we would like to go beyond the paper as a means of communication. I have already mentioned the fact that INSPIRE is now indexing public notes from large experimental collaborations that amplify the discussion in their papers. The next step is to provide numerical backup to these and other papers – digitizations of figures and even data sets on which the analysis is based. These data sets would not be the whole Petabyte data sets of the LHC experiments, but they could be considerably more than simple tables and lists of a few high-significance events. People who want to play with publicly released data will, more and more, be able to find it. If you write a paper based on a data set, you ought to cite the data. INSPIRE is now making it possible to index data sets directly, to provide citations for them, and to have links to the data sets appear in relevant searches.

These are two are the main directions in which INSPIRE should be reaching. High-energy physics is quite far in front of other fields when it comes to scientific information services. Being on the edge benefits us in our research, and I hope that we can stay in the front as this edge moves outward.